Recently in Destination Recovery Category

SideStix is excited to announce that it has been awarded not one, but two awards at this year's MS Society da Vinci Awards Ceremony. The Awards recognize SideStix Forearm Crutches as being a leader in innovation in adaptive mobility and transportation technology.

With the help of you, our loyal fans, we were able to bring in enough YouTube video votes to beat out seventeen competitors. This included entries from both GMC and MIT. The winner of the Leo (People's Choice) Award is based solely on fan votes, making us this year's winner by a large margin. Below is Sarah and Kerith's acceptance speech which was shown live at the award ceremonies.

If winning the Da Vinci Leo Award wasn't exciting enough, SideStix also had the honour of receiving a da Vinci Award in the Transportation and Mobility category. An impartial panel of expert judges representing the technology and disability communities selected the finalists and da Vinci Award winners in each category. Below is the video played at the ceremony of Sarah and Kerith with our video's film maker, Veronica Alice, accepting the award.

We want to thank our fans and user's most of all for the support which allowed us to take home the Leo Award. We would also like to thank the disability community for recognizing the worth of our innovations. Finally, we would like to again thank the MS Society of Michigan for holding the da Vinci Awards to recognize innovation in areas which truly improve the quality of life for people living with disability.

Keep your eyes and ears open for more news from SideStix Ventures. With your continued support we are moving closer to our goal of providing the best forearm crutches allowing our users to remain comfortable, active and healthy!

Source:

http://sidestix.com/sidestix-takes-home-awards-for-innovation-in-high-quality-forearm-crutches/

WORKSHOP "ACESSIBILIDADE E INCLUSÃO APLICADAS AO LAZER E TURISMO"

 
Apesar do Workshop utilizar o lazer e turismo como um cenário, os ensinamentos passados podem ser aplicados em qualquer área de nossa sociedade. É um workshop diferenciado, porque além de tratar da parte física e arquitetônica, também mostra o lado do atendimento e hospitalidade, aos diferentes tipos de deficiência, numa abordagem completa e de qualidade. Será fornecido uma apostila para um melhor acompanhamento da aula, além de um livro digital com inúmeros materiais para servirem de apoio para um aprofundamento muito maior nos assuntos abordados.
 
O Workshop irá acontecer na mesma época da Reatech - Tecnologias em Reabilitação, Inclusão e Acessibilidade, a maior feira internacional do segmento na América do Sul. Assim os alunos poderão conhecer as novidades do mercado, tendências além de estar em contato direto com pessoas com deficiência de diversas partes do Brasil. Então este curso vem surgir com uma proposta inédita no Brasil, feito por profissionais gabaritados, com uma abordagem da melhor qualidade. Será uma oportunidade única de realizar troca de contatos e experiências com pessoas e profissionais das mais diversas áreas.  
 
Local do Curso: Top Tower Offices - Rua Vergueiro, 1.421 - 12° andar - Bairro Paraíso - São Paulo/SP (à 50m da estação Paraiso do Metrô)
Data: 15 e 16 de abril de 2011
Horário: 9h00 às 18h00
 
Investimento
Estudantes: R$380,00
Profissionais: R$450,00
Obs.: Pagamento efetuado até dia 15/03 tem R$30,00 de desconto para estudante ou profissional
Itens inclusos: Coffe-break e material didático
Inscrição e informações: curso@ducaacessibilidade.com.br ou tel.: (11)2225-1421
 
Mais informações, clique no link a seguir http://turismoadaptado.wordpress.com/workshop/

Peter Greenburg Worldwide Travel has several articles on travel with a disability. The latest is on travel in the Gulf Coast region:

• Updated Travel Laws On Accessibility
• Traveling Abroad For Wheelchair Users
• Accessible Travel: The Basics Of Wheelchair Travel
• Ask the Locals Travel Guide: Alabama Gulf Coast
• America's Accessible Heritage
• Volunteer Guide: Helping Gulf Coast Clean-Up Efforts
• Accessible Travel section

Via DPI:

Apr 14 2010 5:05PM 

The United Nations committee on the rights of people with disabilities today urged the Chilean Government and the international community to include needs of the handicapped in the reconstruction plans of areas affected by the earthquake that jolted the country in February. As a matter of priority, reconstruction plans should take into consideration access to physical space, information, communications, transportation, products and services, the Committee on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities said in a statement issued in Geneva.

 "Reconstruction in the areas affected by the devastating February earthquake and tsunami must also become a reality for the disabled," said the current committee's chairperson, Ronald McCallum. "A recent survey shows that an estimated 12.9 per cent of the Chilean population has disabilities, and many in the affected areas were persons with various forms of disabilities," he added. In a recent statement, the 12-member committee also recommended that relief measures take into account the special needs of persons with different forms of disabilities, in particular, in warning procedures, evacuation, information and communications. 

 "Equal attention shall be given to sign language and video captioning of public information regarding the emergency situation in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities," it said. 

 The committee stressed the urgent need to provide services to the disabled, including post-traumatic stress care. It called for "special support in rebuilding their homes, whether in urban or rural areas and those sites that host associations of persons with disabilities and centres that serve them, which have been destroyed or damaged." It said it recognized the efforts of the Chilean Government in the earthquake emergency, but urged the country to "take all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of persons with disabilities in situations of risk, including situations of armed conflict, humanitarian emergencies and the occurrence of natural disasters." The committee is made up of independent experts who monitor the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which so far has been endorsed by 140 countries, including Chile. 

The Convention was adopted in December 2006 by the General Assembly, and entered into force in May 2008. 

 The 8.8-magnitude quake on 27 February claimed the lives of more than 480 people and triggered a tsunami that devastated several coastal towns in south-central Chile.

Introduce Unversal Design thinking a your local pechaha:

Resources: 

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The PBS NewsHour story will not be Whirlwind's first media coverage of wheelchairs for Haiti. Ralf made an apparence on the local CBS 5 news last week. To see the news segment click here. Marc, our Executive Director, also taped a short radio segment for KCBS. To listen click here.

Ralf Hotchkiss is founder and Chief Engineer at Whirlwind Wheelchair. Ralf is speaking about Whirlwind's efforts to assist newly disabled Haitians after the earthquake in January 2010. T

As I look at the Concept Note describing our upcoming seminar on Inclusive Tourism in Mozambique and read comments on Haiti's tourism I see parallels -- and opportunities:

Haiti was getting ready to capitalise on its sunny weather and tropical scenery to attract tourist to that impoverished island nation when the magnitude-7.0 earthquake rocked the French-speaking country, killing an estimated 200,000 and leaving millions homeless.

New hotels, new attention from international investors and buzz among travellers who have visited in recent years seem to signal a renewed interest in Haiti as a destination. Just two hours away by plane from Miami, Florida, the country had one of the strongest tourist industries in the Caribbean in the 1950s and '60s, according to Americas, the magazine of the Organisation of American States.

However, things began to change with the deterioration of the political climate.

Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbour on the island of Hispaniola, welcomed almost four million people in 2008, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organisation.

Source:
http://www.eturbonews.com/14258/tourism-could-play-critical-role-haitis-recovery

Talk of "re-inventing Haiti" has even gone at far as UNWTO. Carlos Vogeler, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation's (UNWTO's) regional representative for the Americas recently commented:

Tourism can be one of the vehicles which can help Haiti to not go back to where they were because they were not in very good shape, but to go to a much better condition than the one they had before.

Note this article on RollingRains.com from before the earthquake, "Can Haiti be Brought Back into The World Tourism Circuit?"

In light of the recent disaster and world mobilization to rebuild the country I would say that the answer is, "Yes, if Inclusive Destination development is practiced."

I recommend that Haitian delegates attend the March 1-3 World Bank funded conference in Maputo on tourism, development, and disability. There we can transfer some relevant knowledge to Haiti through these delegates and plan a more tailored event for the country and for relief and reconstruction entities there.

Listen to Haiti's Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour and get a picture of the situation at:  http://www.theworld.org/tag/patrick-delatour/

The cameraman motions furiously at the lake. The philanthropist inches forward. I peer through long grass and see them: crocodiles. Big ones. Looking at us. In the water behind are dark bulges. More crocodiles. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. We follow the cameraman as he creeps closer along a path I now realise was made by crocodiles. The helicopter is nowhere in sight. What the hell are we doing here?

It's simple. Chris Everson wants some close-up shots of crocs for 60 Minutes, the American television programme. Greg Carr has come to see some of the wildlife that his money and know-how are helping recover. And I'm caught up in the excitement of what might just be the hottest conservation story in Africa.

For the full article: http://www.southernafricadirect.com/news/entries/2009-08-04/mozambiques-gorongoza-park-comes-back-to-life.html

Let's see if we can implant Universal Design thinking into the practice of those rebuilding the poorest country in the Americas. First the immediate response needs our support:


Visit Haiti Disability Disaster Response Community

You Can Help Injured Haitians. Thousands of Wheelchairs Are Needed.

Whirlwind Wheelchairs will rush the production of  RoughRiders from our Mexico factory and possibly from our other regional partners if funds are made available.  For this first order we need $22,000.  

For $220 you can provide a good wheelchair that will help an injured person return to normal life.

To make a donation online at Whirlwind.

To the extent that destination management includes the realization that Universal Design is necessary for social sustainability and geotourism's commitment to inclusion is succeeds in approaching an Inclusive Destination development approach. The following reports on progress in the area of coordinating sustainable corporate social responsibility in the tourism industry.

 Destination Stewardship, Deliberated

It was 2001 when Katrina hit. That was after the tsunami damage in Asia caused Universal Design specialists around the world to raise the concern that disaster relief services, products, and construction disproportionately harmed people with disabilities.

Fast forward to 2009.

If FEMA were one of my students and they had a final exam tomorrow I'd counsel them to call in sick - or maybe just get a doctor to issue a certificate of brain death.

The Associated Press reports that, "By FEMA's count, 2,570 trailers and mobile homes are still being used in Louisiana and 1,500 in Mississippi to house victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita."

They report:

... six newly designed mobile homes were rolled out Thursday by federal officials to replace the much-criticized travel trailers used in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many people said living in the earlier models made them sick.

The mobile homes -- including one travel trailer -- were built as part of a program to develop new disaster housing solutions for the Federal Emergency Management Agency...

The travel trailer prototype -- made by Texas-based Frontier RV -- is the first to have a device that circulates fresh outside air into the trailer, said Ryan Buras, a housing program specialist at FEMA. This one-bedroom trailer is also handicap-accessible (sic) with a bathroom three times larger than the typical travel trailer bathroom.

With little detail to go on it would appear that FEMA has spent five times the effort to make non-Visitable, inaccessible mobile homes than universally usable models and adopted the "Let Mikey try it" approach to retain the disdained travel trailer design  "Let disabled people live in them!"

The math doesn't work. They come eight years too late for a community that reported one quarter of its population (24%) as having disabilities before Katrina yet four fifths of the emergency housing models in FEMA's arsenal are duds.

Politicians and patriots alike would be up in arms if Obama went to war with such poor planning. Yet we know there will be more hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes and other disasters that will spread across our headlines once more that survivors of disasters who have disabilities suffer disproportionately inadequate service.

A community consisting of such segregated housing is hardly worthy of the name "community." It creates, by design,  an artificial scarcity of accessible (and Visitable) housing stock. It isolates people with disabilities from the community. It even has the effect of breaking up families if that family has a member with a disability and needs more than one bedroom.

Was there a Livable Communities criteria in FEMA's mandate? If so, they failed to meet it.

The New York Times reports  that Mexico is poised to lunch a major publicity campaign. Will Mexico use this opportunity to attract travelers with disabilities?

 Mexico prepares to launch a multi-million dollar bid to regain tourists who have decided to go elsewhere and avoid the risk of flu. Why not introduce something never attempted before? Why not market directly to one segment of the traveling public that reports that it would double its travel spending if only it could find appropriate places to travel to (Open Doors Organization 2002 and 2005).

Not only that but this market rates Mexico as one of its top destinations.

Who are they?

The 46 million Americans who spent $46 billion US on travel in 2002.

"In a couple of weeks people are going to want to go back to Mexico," said Mike Trujillo, a travel agent in Santa Rosa, Calif. "There were some great deals before this and there will be better deals now."

The Cancún Hotel Association plans to work first with travel agents in Mexico to bring back Mexican tourists. When the global flu warnings are lifted, the association will begin working with tour operators in the United States and elsewhere.

Oscar Fitch, the executive director of the Mexico Tourism Board, said that once the United States and other countries lift travel advisories to Mexico, Mexico will start a broad campaign to bring visitors back.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/business/global/09peso.html?hp

Even before that campaign starts we advise travelers (and the travel industry) to research the services of companies like these:

Bill Bussear
Freedom Shores Resort
Isla Aguada (Ciudad del Carmen)
Gulf Coast

Judith Cardenas
Cancun Acessible
Cancun, Yucatan
Caribbean Coast

Adriana Ramirez
Mexico Acessible
Puerto Vallarta
Pacific Coast (Sea of Cortez)

Jim Coffey
Esprit Whitewater Adventures
Jalcomulco, Veracruz (inland; seasonal)